Thursday, 2 November 2017

HTC enters the bezel-less race with the U11+

It took HTC a while
to get here, but it finally has a phone with a nearly bezel-free front. The
U11+ has an 18:9 6.0-inch Super LCD6 of 1440x2880px resolution with Gorilla
Glass 5 and no physical buttons on the front (the fingerprint scanner moved to
the rear).

On the back there's
a 12MP UltraPixel 3 OIS camera with an f/1.7 aperture, 1.4µm pixels, UltraSpeed
autofocus, and a dual-LED flash. It can do 1080p video capture at 120fps, and
4K recording with Hi-Res audio.

The front camera
has 8 MP resolution, 85-degree field-of-view, f/2.0 aperture, and 1080p video
recording. The U11+ is housed in an IP68-certified body, which allows it to go
under up to 1.5m of freshwater for up to 30 minutes.

That body is among the prettier around - the
back carries the design language of the U11 with a glossy "Liquid
Surface" back. You get a choice of Ceramic Black, Amazing Silver and
Translucent - the standout among the three.

On the inside the HTC U11+ has a Snapdragon
835 chip, with either 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage or 6/128GB, depending on
region. In all cases you get a microSD card slot too. Also depending on where
you buy it from, you may or may not receive a dual-SIM model.

All of this is powered by an impressive
3,930mAh battery with support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0. The U11+ runs
Android 8.0 Oreo with HTC Sense on top. The Edge Sense functionality that lets
you squeeze the phone to launch features is baked in too.

The device measures 158.5 x 74.9 x 8.5 mm and
weighs 188g. It supports Cat.15 LTE, with maximum peak download speeds of
800Mbps (and 150Mbps uploads). It does not have a 3.5mm headphone jack, but you
were probably expecting that. On the other hand, Bluetooth 5.0 is built-in,
along with Wi-Fi 802.11ac, NFC, GPS, and GLONASS.

Pricing will be €799 in Europe. The U11+ will
be sold in "select markets around the world", but not North America.